(Hear the MP3 version in beautiful monophonic audio.)

New Programs This Week

Listed in increasing order of listener rating. For descriptions, visit the IT Conversations home page.

• Justin Kitch – Homestead (rated 2.6 by our listeners)
• Irving Wladawsky-Berger – IT in an On-Demand World (2.8)
• Peggy Lemaux (2.9)
• Geoffrey Nunberg (3.4)
• Dan Gillmor at SXSW (3.6)
• Jeffrey Rayport (3.7)
• The SXSW Podcasting Panel (3.7)
• Lawrence Lessig at Web 2.0 (3.7)
• The O’Reilly Radar – News from the Future (3.7)

This week’s Doug’s Favorite from the IT Conversations archives:

• Doc Searls (3.8)

We received donations of nearly $2,000 in the IT Conversations Tip Jar during the month of April, and this week I’ll be distributing those proceeds to Team ITC. But in the past two weeks, those donations have started falling off and already May is on a track for far fewer dollars to feed the machine.

We thank all of you who have contributed to our team of volunteers who produce most of IT Conversations’ shows in their spare time, and hope that the rest of you will dig into your pockets to help keep IT Conversations able to bring you our programs.

It took much longer than I hoped, but the first (May 1) IT Conversations Media Kit is now available to qualified underwriters and sponsors. If you’d like to support the #1 audio tech network, please send email to doug@itconversations.com.

As I mentioned three months ago, it looks like we may have to stop delivering .m4b (AAC) versions of IT Conversations audio files. Only about 10% of listeners download the AAC files, and the only significant benefit (other than a slight increase in quality as compared to the MP3s) is that they can be bookmarked on iPods and in iTunes. Unfortunately we have not been able to find an AAC “joiner” that will allow us to splice together already-encoded files as we can do for MP3s. (Does anyone know of such a utility?)

A solution would be for one of our enterprising listeners who knows AppleScript to develop a script that automatically converts files of Genre=Podcast to AAC within iTunes, then deletes the originals. A script like that would be great for iTunes/iPod users for all podcasts, not just IT Conversations.

To be honest, the bookmarking functionality should be built into every player, and there’s no reason it couldn’t be implemented for MP3 files as well.

Congratulations to Cory, the rest of EFF and everyone else who has fought agains the Broadcast Flag. As Cory reported on BoingBoing and Ernest Miller described in more detail, “the DC Circuit of the US Court of Appeals struck down the loathsome Broadcast Flag, ruling that the FCC does not have the jurisdiction to regulate what people do with TV shows after they’ve received them.” This is an important decision in the fight against the copyright cartel.

I was honored to be a guest today on a new public-radio program hosted by Christopher Lydon. It’s called Open Source and we recorded the pilot this morning with Chris and the production team at the WGBH studios, and we guests scattered about the pod/blogosphere. Chris’ voice has been absent from public radio for far too long. [MP3 audio]

Chris has long been one of my personal heroes, although we’ve never met. And though very few people know (or acknowledge) it I believe that Chris, with help from Dave Winer, was the very first podcaster. That is, Dave put together the first RSS feed with MP3 enclosures, in this case Chris’ superb interviews. I copied the RSS syntax a few days later and launched the podcast edition of IT Conversations on 9/24/03. The name “podcast” hadn’t been coined at that time and didn’t become prominent until nearly a year later when Adam Curry began his Daily Source Code show.

(Hear the MP3 version in beautiful monophonic audio.)

New Programs This Week

Listed in increasing order of listener rating. For descriptions, visit the IT Conversations home page.

• Mike Milinkovich – Eclipse Foundation (rated 2.8 by our listeners)
• Peter Hortensius – Lenovo (3.0)
• Dean Karnazes – Ultramarathoner (3.2)
• Richard Marks – Interactive Entertainment User Interfaces (3.4)
• Dan Solove – The Digital Person (3.4)
• Jerry Sanders on Biotech Nation (3.6)
• Stephen Yafa – "Cotton" on Tech Nation (3.7)
• George Dyson – Von Neuman’s Universe (4.1)
• Dave Van Dyke – Changes in Radio (4.2)

This week’s Doug’s Favorite from the IT Conversations archives:

• Bruce Schneier: Beyond Fear (4.0)

Earlier today we passed the milestone of 10,000 registered users on IT Conversations. Since most of our downloads come in anonymously through RSS and other mechanisms, there’s no way to be sure of the ratio of registered-to-non-registered listeners. But if the ratio is the same as that for those who download/stream through the site, our total active listenership (at least one download/stream per month) is between 80,000 and 100,000.

Podcasting has made it into EQ Magazine, one of the better tech publications for recording engineers, etc. In this article by Brian Maggi, he concludes:

Podcasting is real and here, not some vaporware. And yet, some are still going to miss the boat. They won’t recognize its boundless promotional potential, or appreciate the tangible connections it will create with new and existing audio fans.

So you have a choice: Dismiss it now, fear it later, or take this golden opportunity to define and shape it for the better.

Includes the usual mentions of Adam Curry, iPodder.org and Dawn and Drew.

Some of you have heard me preach/predict that the future of podcasting will be reception by autonomous mobile decvices: when you can both manage your RSS/enclosure subscriptions on a wireless mobile device, receive them asynchronously (i.e., not streamed for listening in real time), and cache them on local disk. All without ever using a desktop or notebook computer as we all do now. The new Nokia N91 looks like it might be able to do this given an appropriate application. Expect the other handset manufacturers to offer similar hardware by the end of this year.